The Notes You Don’t Play
In this guest column Antony Giorgione looks at how good copywriting can unravel the issues behind even the most complex and delicate situations – such as ethnic diversity imbalances – to reveal solutions.
The recent release of the 2016 WARC 100 presented some fantastic case studies in effectiveness, and it brought to mind another ingenious and effective piece of creative from last year – perhaps not eligible for WARC but for me just as inspiring by the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) at the Avon and Somerset Constabulary, in the UK.
It revolves around some copywriting used to address an ethnic diversity imbalance, and was the work of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) out of the UK. BIT was established in 2013 by the Cameron Government as an entity to address behavioural change in areas of public policy and services through the application of statistical insight and an understanding of the behavioural sciences.
Fascinating!
It’s great to see data supporting what good people managers know intuitively – positive reinforcement works.
Also that it works especially well if you are managing diverse teams where some speak up more than others and you suspect there may be some self-censoring by the quiet ones.
Thanks Antony for adding some rigour on this important topic…
@Megan. I appreciate your comment. You’ve touched on an interesting point, that this type of knowledge is sometimes understood intuitively. I’m hoping over the longer term to discuss how some of these statistically and theoretically based communications methodologies parallel those in the marketing industry – most particularly from the ‘intuitive’ advertising creative.
As to the specifics of this case study, I was initially drawn in by the seemingly enormous intuitive leap of the solution, and in looking more deeply the BIT have introduced me to both ‘stereotype threat’ and ‘values affirmation’ as quantifiable concepts for my own future use. Most thanks should of course be directed to the BIT themselves.